I’m going to go out on a limb here, maybe the solution to many of the US’s international problems is to simply stop handing out weapons.

Maybe we should just not give guns to every despot, dictator or warlord we meet.

I did say that, because this isn’t a pie chart situation, it’s a Venn diagram situation.

For instance, AI art is 99% theft and 60% garbage. It’s both because there’s overlap.

Stolen and bad aren’t opposites, why would this be a dichotomy?

Oh, I enjoy lots of great art! But do you think I watch every film? Listen to every band? There’s tons of shit out there!

Do you really believe, of all the songs that are written every day, that less than a third are crap? Even Taylor Swift doesn’t publish everything she does. Sometimes you work on something for weeks and then end up tossing it in the bin. More often, you work on something for 30 minutes before deciding “I’m gonna start over, try something different”. The majority of art is crap, but then you keep the stuff you think works.

And what’s that expression, “good artists copy, great artists steal”. I mean, that’s a bit satirical, but the fact is, everything is derivative to some degree. It’s not that there aren’t new ideas, it’s just that our new ideas are based on older ones. We stand on the shoulders of giants (or at least, on the shoulders of some people who came before us).

All I was really saying, was that the accusation “2 parts copying, 1 part crap”, well honestly that’s par for the course, that’s how humans work. (And we do some great work that way).

Yeah that would probably work

The majors hate CDs as you can rip them and listen to a perfect digital copy as much as you like without generating a cent of streaming revenue

Well it’s not really worth fussing about. I mean they can never escape the analogue loophole…

Audio is super easy to copy and there are plenty of ways to do it. Copying will always happen, forever. DRM is just a spectacular waste of time for audio and video.

AI artworks 1/3rd shite and 2/3rds theft.

To be fair, that could be said of most art.

So… Ted voted against his own bill?

Really you don’t want hackers using your random Internet appliance as a point of attack to access your whole network.

More IoT devices means a greater attack surface. And it’s an appliance you don’t actually want to spend time thinking about. You don’t want to waste time troubleshooting network issues with your dehumidifier… It just needs to work, or you use a different one.

Probably lots of people in red states. Farmers for instance, people who generally buy the Republican bullshit, but may personally rely heavily on immigrant workers. ICE puts them in a really tough position.

Well it seems I don’t know enough about the individual components involved in manufacturing to argue this point, so I’ll just drop it and concede. I don’t know how much individual components will cost at scale, right now.

But I’ll still pay extra for dumb devices. I’ll pay even more for old devices that I can service myself.

deleted by creator

Waaa! He said something mean to me! Waaa!

There could be money involved…

Look, I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never built a dehumidifier (I’m sure you’re shocked). I don’t know what exact components tend to be used. What I do know is that I have a fairly new dehumidifier and we have another one from probably the early 80s. Somehow they both work. Again, I’m not sure what components were used in the older model, but given the age I’d be very surprised if the electronics it uses would be more expensive to manufacture than the newer one.

Really, I think the idea I’m trying to get across is just that you can always aim lower. Sometimes the goal isn’t achieving perfect precision, but rather achieving something good enough. Take toasters for example, most toasters don’t have a timer at all. They have a little piece of metal almost touching a contact. When you turn the toaster on, that metal heats up and it bends until it touches that contact, ding toast is done. And when you turn the little dial from light to dark it just moves that piece of metal slightly further from the contact. My point is, it’s not exact, it won’t be the same on every toaster, and it will probably shift over time. It’s a low tech solution for something that could absolutely be done in a more modern, more precise, and still inexpensive way (a simple timer). But it’s cheaper and simpler to just do it the old way, and for many applications, that’s fine.

Hell, I’m certain there are dehumidifiers on the market that don’t have any kind of humidity sensor at all. Even simpler…

Honestly, having any of these vulnerable devices on your network is exposing your whole network, assuming the network is connected to the web.

Your best off using either a separate network for your smart devices with its own router, or setting up a vlan to keep your smart appliances and actual computers separate.

Now you’re getting it!

It’s likely that the cheapest way to design and build a dehumidifier these days will already include a microcontroller interpreting results from a digital hygrometer because these components are cheap and easier to work with than purely electronic/electromechanical designs with no microcontroller.

Well this part is definitely not true. A microcontroller and Wi-Fi chip are definitely more expensive than a wire, a variable resistor and a knob, which is all a purely electro-mechanical system would need in addition to the hydrometer.

The fancy digital version wouldn’t be a lot more expensive, but it certainly wouldn’t be the cheapest way to go.

That said, I think you’re right that most companies will opt to go the fancy digital route to try to sell a “smart” product with more features. But then I expect there will also always be companies that manufacture simpler, cheaper products as well.

Well it’s a **de-**humidifier. You need to lug water from it. For the dehumidifier in my basement, we have it hooked up to a hose that takes the water right down the drain.

But I do take your point, it is pretty funny.

but a microcontroller with WiFi like the ESP8266 or ESP32-C3 costs less than an accurate hygrometer chip

Ok, two things.

First, the cost of the Wi-Fi chip is clearly not the issue here. The real expense/concern is the effort and software mechanisms needed to secure that network connection. Connecting to the Internet is easy, securing that connected device is hard.

Secondly, at some point you still need the hygrometer, there’s no way around that. Either your dehumidifier is tracking humidity, or your home automation system needs to track humidity. And you can’t like… get that data from the web somehow, you need a local sensor, and it will generally only make sense to have it in the same room as the dehumidifier (meaning not necessarily where other smart home components are set up).

Eh, it’s not the worst rule.